


i forget the rest

by trash_rendar



Category: Final Fantasy IX
Genre: Drabble, Gen, amnesiac angst, freya deserved better, so did fratley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-11-02 05:42:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20640572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trash_rendar/pseuds/trash_rendar
Summary: On Burmecian dragon knights, as they were and as they are.





	i forget the rest

**Author's Note:**

> "We were together. I forget the rest."  
\- Walt Whitman

He knows she’s still waiting for the old Fratley to come back.

He’s waiting, too, hoping that reliving some shared moment will snap himself back into the man he was. For a time, they rove across the continent searching for that moment, that one salvaged memory that will shatter the barrier between Iron-Tail Fratley and whoever he was now – but they don’t find it.

Reis knows he’s trying, but it never seems to be enough. “Sir Fratley” still feels like a myth to him, a name and a face slipping away under a sheet of ice while he watches, bloodying his knuckles on the mirrored frost as he sinks deeper below and farther away. It rends something deep in his soul, knowing that he’s lost everything he was, and not knowing what he is now.

He never quite relearns who he was during their travels, but he learns quite a bit about Freya, and who they are together. Her dry, wry sense of humor makes him laugh in a way that feels both old and new; the way he sees their beloved Burmecia through a strangers’ eyes makes her smile in a way that feels both longing yet content. They move and fight as a team almost as easily as breathing. He wonders if it’s because they are Dragoons, or because they are Fratley and Freya (even if one of them isn’t, anymore, and after years apart who knew if the other one was, either).

When Fratley left her in the past, he’s been told, there was still a gulf of experience between them; in the present, he can feel, they are equals. In the heat of battle, that he feels her skill completely eclipse his own.

Powerful though she is, it’s her _inner_ strength that surprises him the most, and it shames him that he took so long to see it. Their country, their people, their love – these were things that he had lost years ago, things he would never have realized he’d lost unless someone told him. Freya had lost them all in the span of a few _hours_, faster than it took for one domino to tip and fall into another. After all that, to endure the crisis that engulfed Gaia afterward, to endure those years of anxious searching before, and to keep enduring even now…

She’s indomitable. And he’s grateful that she’ll lend her strength to him, even now. More than anything, though, he’s grateful that his stranger’s eyes can see it.

(He wonders, sometimes, if he had seen it before he lost himself. He hopes so.)

There are still moments, yes, even if they’re not the one they’re searching for – when her hand in his, and his in hers, are all they need. Moments where they still aren’t the same people they used to be, and maybe they never would be again, but that doesn’t seem to bother them as much anymore. An imperfect reunion seems to be enough for Freya, and despite everything, it seems to be enough for him, too.

Maybe this new Fratley will always be a stranger. But even if he doesn’t come back, at least he knows he’s come home.


End file.
